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Selling in Greater Seattle's Cooling Market

The Seattle Times reports home sales prices have dropped 7 percent since May. It's important to remember, though, that they are still up 9.6% from just a year ago. What the Seattle market is experiencing is called a price correction. Buyers can no longer bare the rising home prices and homes are now selling for 0.6% below list price.

It can be difficult for home sellers to accept this market change. Real estate transactions are driven by the market and a seller must adapt if they want to sell. Adapting in this case simply means lowering the list price.

What To Do If Your Home is Not Selling

Let's take another look at the chart above and add some color.

Homes in the orange zone sit in the market because they are priced too high for the market at the time. Homes in the green zone sell. If a home is not selling, it is in the orange zone and the only person who can correct the price to bring it into the green "selling zone" is the seller.

Many sellers are afraid to drop their price because they worry they will lose money. Remember, the list price is an advertisement to buyers. Getting buyers interested in the home is every seller's goal.

Faira was built to be the best solution for sellers who price in the green zone not to worry that they priced "too low in the green". The platform was built specifically to address this and extract the best price in the open market. So as long as you place your home in the green zone, it will bubble up to the top of the orange line - wherever that line may be at the time.

Faira Recommendation for Home Sellers

Our recommendation is that if you have no offers on your home then you should decrease the price substantially. Note that on Faira, unrepresented buyers have a 3% advantage, since they can save on buyer’s agent commission. So if your home is not getting any interest, even from agent-less buyers, it means your home is at least 3% or more overpriced in this market. The longer you wait at your current price the more you may be losing. On average in the last few months, as per Seattle Times, sellers have lost 1% monthly. It is not surprising, since in the past sellers were gaining 1% monthly. In fact, recently a seller sold a home at a lower price than the offers he declined a couple of months back when he originally listed. Trying to get that extra dollar beyond what the market wanted to offer cost the seller much more.

When you choose Faira to sell, you have several advantages over all other sellers. Not only a 3% discount for unrepresented buyers, but you can even pass on your listing agent savings to buyers to price your home even more competitively and still net the same amount as a seller with a similar home using a 6% agent. If you list your home for sale, clearly your desired position is to sell, so you must listen to the market and price your home to attract today’s buyers.

Kamal is the CEO and Co-Founder of Faira.com. A technologist and economist, Kamal specializes in designing business models for the internet, which he did for both Microsoft and eBay. Kamal now wants to align the interests of home buyers and home sellers with Faira.